Embolden -slightly- a font

[roger64]

Hi

Kobo implemented some years ago a very successful "Type Genius" feature. I do not use anymore a Kobo but I dream about emboldening slightly my font of choice. I tried it many times, without any success and so I have to read with another one.

We can do it -say- with FontForge (Elements - Styles) then Change weight except that I do not manage to export any emboldened font. Ths is really frustrating.

Could someone try it or give a detailed recipe on how to do it? It's an opensource font.
The otf and ttf versions can be downloaded from here. I would appreciate having a modified normal and italic versions.

http://www.linuxlibertine.org/index.php?id=1&L=1

[JSWolf]

Why not try the semibold versions and see if they have enough weight for you?

[roger64]

Semi-bold is way too bold.

I'd like to embolden it slightly, about the way you did for Charis.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by roger64

Semi-bold is way too bold.

I'd like to embolden it slightly, about the way you did for Charis.

I can do it for you. Might not be until Monday though.

[roger64]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I can do it for you. Might not be until Monday though.

I would indeed be very grateful of you if you could do so.
I tried it, not continuously of course, but at repeated times for some years...

[sherman]

I may have a tool that could be useful for you roger64, if you wish to give it a go.

Attached is my WIP tool which has a basic frond end to quickly perform some font related tasks, including enboldening fonts.

The tool basically calls fontforge to perform the actual changes.

To run it, you need a recent build of fontforge (late 2015 or younger). If you have Calibre installed, you don't need anything else. Otherwise you will also need to download Python 2.7/3.x, and PyQt.

To run it using calibre, at the command prompt, run:

calibre-debug path/to/ReadifyFont-Qt.py

Otherwise, with python and PyQt installed, you should be able to run the script directly.


Note that this is a WiP build that I haven't worked on in months, and remains unreleased, so there will probably be some bugs. There is no guarantee that the preview functionality works properly, and that feature isn't really complete anyway.

To use it, load up to four files (regular, italic, bold, bold italic), check the font variant in the drop down box matches the font file loaded, Give the font a new name, choose options related to kerning, PANOSE etc, and choose how much to embolden a font by. I personally like using 12-15. 50 is considered "bold". Adjust it to your personal taste.
Also note, that only regular and italic fonts will be emboldened. The tool will not modify the weights of bold or bold italic, so you can safely load all variants to give them consistent names and options.

EDIT: Updated the zip file to fix an error that meant TTF files couldn't be loaded.

[roger64]

@sherman

Of course, I will try it. Thanks. I am an Arch Linux user.

Up to now (even with the Windows software FontCreator, but also with FontForge) I manage to bolden all the glyphs of one font, then it seems like all is saved all right... but when I open the font, nothing really changed.

[sherman]

The tool SHOULD work under Arch, although I cannot guarantee it. I tried to make sure I used no OS specific code.

Again, there is a reason I have not made a public release of the tool, and that is because I am not confident it is robust enough to do so.

[roger64]

Hi

I used the latest version of your script (should you give it a version number?).

On Arch Linux I had to install the python-pyqt5 package on top of the already installed Python packages.

This is to report success with a Linux Libertine.ttf font family where only the regular and italic fonts have been modified. I added them to Koreader (to replace the old ones) on my PW3 and checked that these two fonts have indeed been slightly boldened (+8).

Once I put the terminal on the path, to start the GUI I used

fontforge -script ReadifyFont-Qt.py

This is only a first trial. I will try now other options and also to modify the .otf version.

Thank you very much for such a nice -and easy- tool.

[sherman]

I haven't given it a version number yet, because I don't feel it's quite ready for release just yet.

I'm glad you've found it useful though!

I'm a bit surprised you can launch the GUI with the fontforge binary TBH. On windows it doesn't work, as it can't use PyQt5.

So for anybody else reading, I advise launching the GUI with python, and not fontforge. The CLI script on the other hand...

[roger64]

The luck to use a recent Arch version:

[roger@anterg ~]$ fontforge -v
Copyright (c) 2000-2014 by George Williams. See AUTHORS for Contributors.
 License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
 with many parts BSD <http://fontforge.org/license.html>. Please read LICENSE.
 Based on sources from 13:54 TAHT  6-May-2016-ML-D.
 Based on source from git with hash: 
no xdefs_filename!
TESTING: getPixmapDir:/usr/share/fontforge/pixmaps
TESTING: getShareDir:/usr/share/fontforge
TESTING: GResourceProgramDir:/usr/bin
trying default theme:/usr/share/fontforge/pixmaps/resources
fontforge 13:54 TAHT  6-May-2016
libfontforge 20160506

[sherman]

Note that if you don't want to bother with the GUI, you can also run the CLI script instead. The GUI is literally a wrapper for the CLI.